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Iraq has a proposed new constitution, which will go before Iraqi voters for
approval in a referendum Oct. 15th.

The outlook is cloudy. Most of the Sunni Arabs on the committee which
drafted the constitution wouldn't sign it, for fear they won't get what they
imagine to be their fair share of Iraq's oil revenues.

Iraq's proven oil fields are in the north, where the Kurds are, and in the
south, where the Shia Arabs are. The Sunni Arabs are concentrated in the
west central portion of the country.

So Sunnis suspect the constitution's provisions for federalism will make it
possible for the Kurds and the Shia to abscond with the oil.

Since the Shia and the Kurds together comprise more than 80 percent of the
electorate, there is little doubt the proposed constitution can attract
majority support. But a provision put into the law that governs the
referendum at the insistence of the Kurds could bite them.

That provision says that if two thirds or more of the voters in any three
provinces reject the constitution, it is null and void. The Kurds dominate
the three northernmost provinces, so this would permit them to veto any
provision they did not like. But there are also three provinces in which
Sunnis are a majority.

If the constitution is rejected, the Kurds may press for formal secession.
This will be described as a catastrophe by two sets of people.

The first are those who regard  or at least want you to regard  any
development in Iraq as bad so long as President Bush figures to get some
credit for anything good.

The second, comprised chiefly of our diplomats, are those who think any
change in any border is bad. It is fascinating to me how the State
Department is always for the status quo, no matter what the status quo is,
and no matter how bitterly State opposed the status quo before it became the
status quo.

As Ralph Peters points out in his superb book, "New Glory," our commitment
to intact borders is so great that "a Republican secretary of state tried to
persuade the splintering Soviet Union to remain whole  after we had
finally cracked it apart."

This is ridiculous. We face monstrous problems today because the boundaries
of most countries in Africa and the Middle East were drawn by European
colonialists for their convenience, without regard for the wishes of the
people who lived there. Tribes were divided by artificial borders. Bitter
enemies were thrust together in the same "country."

Iraq is an example. It was cobbled together from three disparate elements
of the Ottoman empire after World War I.

I would like to see Iraq stay together in a democratic federal union,
providing for the rest of the Arab world an example of a peaceful,
prosperous multi-ethnic society. And I'd just as soon we not have to put up
with the headaches a breakup of Iraq would entail.

But what for us would be a mild headache figures to be a migraine for our
enemies, says Jack Wheeler.

Wheeler is a real-life Indiana Jones. He's parachuted onto both the north
and south poles, led expeditions up the Amazon. He spent much of the 1980s
with anticommunist resistance movements in Afghanistan, Nicaragua, Angola
and Mozambique. And  after Ralph Peters  Jack is the best "outside the
box" thinker I know.

Fewer than half the people in Iran are ethnically Persian, Wheeler notes.
There are more Kurds in Iran on the border with Iraqi Kurdistan than there
are in Iraqi Kurdistan itself. In the northwest there are eight million
Azeris who would rather be part of neighboring Azerbaijan. There are three
million Turkmen in the northeast who would rather be part of Turkmenistan.
In the southeast, there are three million Baluchis who would rather be part
of the Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

The mullahs in Tehran are waging war to break Iraq apart, but this is
suicidally stupid, Wheeler says, because Iraq breaking apart will lead
inevitably to Iran breaking apart.

"So if the mullahs are crazy enough to crank up the Persian ratchet by going
after Shia Iraq, George Bush may be happy to crank it all the way until Iran
shatters," he said.

Wheeler also explains why partition of Iraq spells curtains for Syria and
Saudi Arabia. But you'll have to read about this in his excellent
newsletter, "To the Point." I've run out of space.

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JWR contributor Jack Kelly, a former Marine and Green Beret, was a
deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan
administration. Comment by clicking here.